Monday blues

Photo credit: SimonSCh, via Flickr

Mondays are not dreadful but are generally exhausting. Patients who didn't get to see their doctors over the weekend are likely to consult on the first work day of the week. Patients on follow up are also likely to pop up in the consultation rooms, usually to get over the inconvenience of things medical, leaving the rest of their weekly calendars clear of clinical obligations. The concept of Monday as a busy working day used to be an abstract idea--I never held out-patient clinics on Mondays during my residency in Internal Medicine--but weeks into my clinical fellowship in Oncology, I've relearned my lesson the hard way: don't pack my Mondays with chemotherapy sessions. This allows me more time to see new patients, see in-patient referrals, and finish some paperwork, without compromising the quality of the care I give (or so I believe).

This means I prefer staying at home on Sunday evenings, to catch up on sleep, reading (both for pleasure and work, which are not mutually exclusive), and other miscellaneous things weekends allow me to do. Sunday afternoons are when I write in this little nook of the Web; if I have the extra energy, I write blog posts in advance, in anticipation of days when I'm too tired to even open my computer.

So let me do a little introspection and share with you a useful and refreshing article by Pastor Oscar Villa, where he writes about work.

I used to think that work was a necessary evil—something that I had to do, instead of something that I got to do. I thought that there wouldn’t have been any need to labor and toil, if it hadn't been for humanity’s fall into sin. I imagined that if one were wealthy, then he wouldn’t have to work. Imagine my surprise as I sat under Bible teaching that pointed to work even before sin had entered into the world.

A couple of observations from the Creation narrative in Genesis 1-3 can help us think more clearly about work.

That God was Himself a worker is an important theological point that gives us, human beings, who toil under the sun, the comfort that He knows what we go through.